A travel essay in which, during a last-minute solo excursion to Lake Atitlan, Jami Attenberg considers the advantages to taking more risks and opening up to the unfamiliar, and the differences between healthy solitude and isolation.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner goes to Iceland in search of relief and discovers that the island nation, with its quirky puffins and lunar landscape and crowds upon crowds of American tourists, lends itself well to the pursuit of escape.

To celebrate the release of the 2016 edition of Best American Travel Writing, here’s one of the essays reprinted in the anthology. In it, writer Freda Moon visits her father in Panama on the cusp of having her first child. People kept telling her “having children will change everything,” but her traveling parents taught her that parenting does not spell the end of exploration and adventure.